Study: 42% read newspapers online

Print revenues for newspapers and some magazines may be down, but according to data out from comScore that doesn't necessarily mean readership is down. According to their calculations 644 million global consumers surfed to online newspaper hubs (October 2012), making up 42.6% of the entire online population.

The most popular online newspaper hubs included the Mail Online (50 million unique visitors, October 2012), The New York Times (46.7 million unique visitors) and The Guardian (38.9 million unique visitors), finds comScore. Other top traffic getters included Tribune Newspapers, People's Daily Online, Telegraph Media Group and WashingtonPost.com.

Meanwhile, the Newspaper Association of America notes that more than 1.13 million US consumers visited newspaper websites (November 2012), with the average daily traffic hitting about 22 million unique users. These readers spent more than four thousand minutes on-site and visited nearly nine times per month.

According to Pew Research three-quarters of Americans say they 'read a newspaper yesterday', whether they lived in an urban or rural area.

"While residents of urban, suburban and rural communities are similar in most of their reading habits with regard to daily newspapers, there are differences across communities in residents' magazine/journal reading habits and in the frequency of reading either newspapers or magazines/journals on handheld devices such as a tablet computer, e-reader or cell phone," was written in the report.

The US is fairly evenly when it comes to regional reading habits - 57% of Urban residents read newspapers while 60% of Suburban's do so and 54% of Rural residents read newspapers. Numbers are slightly different when looking at how these readers are engaging - urban (56%) and suburban (57%) residents are most likely to read newspapers via mobile devices than their rural counterparts (45%).